Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
(October 3, 1925 - July 31, 2012) was an American author, playwright,
essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The
City and the Pillar (1948), outraged mainstream critics as one of
the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality. He
also ran for political office twice and was a longtime political critic. (Click
for full article)

A concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed
is now a sign of the higher altruism. But then to reverse, periodically,
the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for the freedom not
only to conform but to consume.

A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost
without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

Andy Warhol is the only genius with an IQ of 60.

Apparently, “conspiracy stuff” is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are
used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by
destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people
will solemnly vote against their own interests.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition,
misinformation, and prejudice.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of
the constitution as a working machine.

Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking
for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed
immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for
President- the same half?

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the
United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it
might be true.

I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

It makes no difference who you vote for- the two parties are really one
party representing four percent of the people.

Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to
a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy
through change and reform. One can see why the word had to be erased
from our political lexicon.

My father had a deep and lifelong contempt for politicians in general.
“They tell lies,” he used to say with wonder, “even when they don't have
to.”

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought
religion back to this country.

Private lives should be no business of the State. The State is bad
enough as it is.

Religions are manipulated in order to serve those who govern society and
not the other way around.

Some bastards have been great presidents.

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a
damn.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the
people who ask the questions.

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country-
and we haven't seen them since.

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders
of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to
eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity- much less dissent.

The hatred Americans have for their own government is pathological, if
understandable. At one level it is simply thwarted greed: since our
religion is making a buck, giving a part of that buck to any government
is an act against nature.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

The unfed mind devours itself.

There is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is
such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives
describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal;
if they were not, no one would perform them.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books,
and there is some evidence that they can't read them, either.

We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the
withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our
pseudo-Roman columns.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest
democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of
militarised republic. The founding fathers hated two things, one was
monarchy and the other was democracy, they gave us a constitution that
saw to it we will have neither. I don't know how wise they were.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral
timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid
to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free
enterprise for the poor.

You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the
American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the
horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It's
just grotesque.

You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been
quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.